Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith was on view at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts from July 11 – November 30 2024. The exhibit puts the artist’s life on display alongside his art and collections. It follows him from an isolated Depression-era childhood in the Pacific Northwest—a time when he was immersed in ecstatic religious philosophies and Native American ceremony—to his counterculture youth of marijuana, peyote, and intellectualism in postwar Berkeley, California. The exhibition traces his path through the milieus of bebop and experimental cinema in San Francisco to his decades in New York, where he was an essential part of the city’s avant-garde fringe. The exhibition’s design is by artist Carol Bove.

Keenly attuned to changing technology, Harry Smith embraced innovation and used whatever was new and of the moment. At the same time, his lifelong interest in abstract art, ancient traditions, metaphysics, spiritualism, folk art, and world music came to the fore even as he devised ingenious ways of collecting sounds and creating films. These concerns make Smith’s work feel increasingly prescient as collecting and sharing come into view as creative acts that are necessary for drawing meaning from the glut of images and juxtaposition of cultures that we encounter every day.

This exhibition is co-organized by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University with the Whitney Museum of American Art where the exhibition opened in New York in October 2023. Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith is curated by artist Carol Bove; Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts; Rani Singh, Director of the Harry Smith Archives; Elisabeth Sussman, Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; with Kelly Long, Senior Curatorial Assistant and McClain Groff, Curatorial Project Assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Danni Shen, Curatorial and Public Programs Assistant at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

An exhibition catalog is available to purchase here!

Click through to watch video content from the symposium.

Videos